Ithacans are proud of our excellent
small city, energetic yet relaxed in the valley, bounded by hills, lake
and university. We enjoy the best of urban life, amid
cascades and farms. Most of us can walk ten minutes to wild
rushing water, fine restaurants and good theater. In Ithaca's
six square miles are yachts and forest, stone churches and boutiques,
thousands of computers at work in old homes.

All races, styles and ages of people work together, study, play and are
snowbound together. We are garden fresh and modern, our blood
runs autumn colors. Many newcomers have found a homeland
here, a great place to raise kids. Oldtimers are comfortably
settled.

Yet throughout Ithaca and Tompkins County people are seeing this good
life being pushed aside by aggressive development. We see it
most dramatically in Lansing and Collegetown, but it is happening
suddenly, or gradually, everywhere. Ill winds rise, carrying
the dust from construction sites, the rattle of bulldozers, the drone
of traffic, the smell of gasoline and cash. Perhaps more
boldly than ever before, with the population growth twice as fast as
New York state's, greater Ithaca builds up and outward.

Growth
and Progress

Cornell is spreading farther above Cayuga's waters, embarked on
record-breaking expansion. This "major international
resource" raises some dozen new buildings, upgrades others and plans
still more, to capture government-- and industry-- research
contracts. Big Red employs over 6,000 faculty and staff to
supercompute such notable frontiers as microelectronics, Star Wars and
gene splicing. Cornell's new 500-seat Performing Arts Center
fits tight by gorge and garage. A campus loop road is being
designed. The orchards would be replaced by building and
road. And so on.

Pyramid Mall would become the largest structure in Tompkins County if
allowed to add seven cinemas. Landing Village, home of the
county's bloodiest intersection (the overpass), also faces Texas
developers who want to build a fortress for 700 rich families, complete
with private golf course, beside a new conference center and hotel.

New hotels and wider roads are applauded by the Tompkins County Chamber
of Commerce, which expects even more tourists this year, thanks to
national mailings and media. "Publicity last year was
negligible compared to this year," says Tony Spinelli of the
Conventions and Visitors Bureau. Promotion this season will
"hit the natural beauty of the area," he says.

The Town of Ithaca's suburbanization has fed unprecedented traffic jams. Building
permits for about 650 more housing units are approved. Most
of these are along Route 79 (East Hill) and King Road (South
Hill). Sewerage being extended out Trumansburg Road would be
ready for the suburbs which would follow a new four-lane Route
96. "We know there are large landowners on West Hill waiting
to see what happens with Route 96," says Susan Beeners, the Town of
Ithaca's planner. Although she finds "a lot of reaction
against proposed projects," few neighborhoods are organized to resist
them. "There is a sense in the community we are at the edge
of tremendous expansion," she says.

Garbage Mountain in Danby grows by 350,000 pounds daily. The
county dump will expire next year, ages 17 years.
Twenty-three sites have been proposed for the next one. It
will be known as a "sanitary landfill" because dripping carcinogens are
to be kept from groundwater by a one-eighth--inch plastic
diaper. Nobody wants to live by the dump, but everyone wants
to make trash.

Cornell has the city's taxpayers hard at work, using our planning
department to organize housing the University fails to build.
Student pressure on off-campus housing raises rents and drives
residents out. Taxpayers also provide Cornell bargain fire
protection and road repair and will pay $800,000 for a parking ramp
needed by the Performing Arts Center.

Wegman's is the latest pearl on the Elmira Road strong, welcomed with a
50 percent tax write-off. While the city's population has not
increased lately, its budget jumped 19 percent this year, a record.

NYSEG is stimulating industrial development by offering discount
electricity to heaviest users, a practice prohibited back when the
nation valued its fuel supply.

Tompkins County Airport intends to build a new terminal and stretch
string runway 1,200 feet, to greet more passengers.

The Tompkins County Department of Planning is working for all the
above. Its specialty is roads. Mapped large on the
office wall are several proposed routes, the skeleton of a metropolitan
system. When citizens rejected the East Ithaca Connector as a
trans-Ithaca beltway which would have sped suburbanization, planners
began building piece-by-piece "improvements" to accomplish the same aim.

Octopus traffic was passable until County planners promoted locating
the new hospital and DSS on West Hill. Rather than restore
nonstop traffic, by chopping the Octopus into four bridges (Plan
A-modified), planners prefer cutting a new four-lane up the hill.

Department staff members also want a four-lane Route 13 connecting
Ithaca to Route 81 at cortland. It would make Ithaca an
attractive shortcut and replace today's route, which causes average
fatalities for a two-lane state road.

Major employers favor wide highways because they bring commuters from
farther away, to compete for jobs. As count planners said,
"it is desirable to have some unemployment, to maintain healthy
competition among labor" (Human Resources III, p.37, TCDP).

Among other monuments to Growth which follow this kind of Progress: the
County Jail recently expanded from 33 cells to 55, to handle the
increase in drug busts, assaults, murders, rapes and
burglaries. City Police Chief James Herson notes, "when you
start packing people together to make a bigger city, crime
rises." As pressure mounts, the young become alienated, and
tough.

Recently citizens began organizing, convinced the destruction of ithaca
greenbelt, for highways and subdivisions, is not growth but decay.

The city's planning board heard 40 speak for growth control, at a
special meeting in March. Their voices, joining others
countywide, are becoming known as the Save Ithaca movement.
They are demanding slowed development, protection for neighborhoods,
and more control of planning. They see the ruin of Ithaca's
intimate scale and friendly streets not a progress, but
sadness. "There is not place you can look that they're not
building. It's insane," says Robert Lieberman, author of Paradise Rezoned.

Ruth
Mahr of Forest Home favors comprehensive planning which considers
the costs of growth: the increased taxes for roads, water,
sewerage,police, courts, fire and traffic control. Studies in
Denver
and Palo Alto found that government needed to charge developers nearly
half the selling price of a new home (in addition to regular taxes),
just to pay for additional public services.

Bill Goldsmith, chairman of Cornell's Department of City and Regional
Planning, believes that "while the University offers freedom to
innovate, it on the other hand fails to adequately coordinate"
long-range plans for child care, transportation, energy and student
housing.

Joel Rabinowitz and many others learned hard lessons
rom the Valentine Place massacre. City officials defied
neighborhood
opposition to a major student housing project, by "deception, false
assurances and collusion with the developer," he said.

"We can't
afford to forget, to let this happen again," says Victoria Romanoff,
restoration consultant for clinton House and Clinton Hall.
"Planers
are despoiling so many regions that even they would someday have
nowhere to escape to."

Bickley Townsend, former Ithaca city
planner and recent president of the Bryant Park Civic Association,
says, "The Department justifies the building boom by saying they want
to keep students near campus and thereby keep rents elsewhere
low. But
rents rise anyway. They should put their efforts primarily to
creating
affordable housing."

While City planners claim to be racing
ithaca town developers to keep housing from sprawling beyond Ithaca,
more tall dull walls in Collegetown do not slow the Town's growth.
While they claim to need 1,200-1,500 new units to "meet the demand," a
different kind of demand is being raise.

Dan Hoffman (D-5th Ward, City council), announcing hi candidacy for
mayor of Ithaca (5/13)
said,
"The transformation from human-scale buildings to highrise skyline,
from meadow and farmland to suburban shopping center and condos, is
usually not a conscious, democratic choice, but a series of small steps
that eventually adds up to a radically different community.
The
essential questions for Ithaca right now should be: What kind of
community do we want? What kind of change is
desirable? THen: How can
we exert the control and management that is necessary to get or
preserve what we want? There are alternatives."

Calling a
Halt, to Begin Again

Ithacans
have tremendous power to decide Ithaca's future. Hundreds of
American
cities and towns strictly regulate growth, for "health, safety,
prosperity and general welfare." They have enacted firm and
legal
growth management laws, to guide the timing, type and location of any
development. We can begin to do the same here.

While courts
properly reject zoning laws which attempt to exclude the poor, they
increasingly rule that growth itself is exclusionary. It
drives away
longtime residents whose neighborhoods are torn up. And it
excludes
future generations from what is enjoyed today, by cramming too many
here at one time.

All the following controls, of varied
strengths, have been upheld by state and federal courts.
Dozens of
cities in New York state use the moratorium, refusing to issue or
review building permits for as much as two years. This buy s
time to
make or revise comprehensive plans; to study sewage, soils,
water,
zoning, wetlands; to decrease traffic; to protect old homes; stabilize
rents and restrain fast-food joints.

All across the country
there are cities which ration building permits, to limit the
residential growth rate. Some, like Ramapo, N. Y., sell these
permits
to those developers who score most points for best design, site, and
provision of low--income housing. And these permits don't
come cheap:
man cities charge developers several dollars per square foot (or a
percentage of construction costs), to fund day care, arts festivals and
parks. Hartford, Conn. requires commercial developers to pay
into a
fund for low-income housing and job training. Then they
require that
local residents be hired for construction and permanent jobs.
Burlington, Vt, controls rents b investing in land trusts and
limited-equity co-ops, while Santa Monica, Calif. dose so with rent
control.

Voters in Eastlake, Ohio, and other places decide
whether a subdivision is built. Voters in San Diego got fed
up with
loopholes in zoning, and now vote on variance petitions, three times
yearly.

While some municipalities levy sales taxes to buy
greenbelts and agricultural preserves, others float bonds to acquire
property (at present value) for open space. Funds also buy
easements,
and compensate owners for downzoning.

Most decisive of all are
cities like Corvallis, Ore., which declares "urbanization shall be
contained within the urban boundary." They draw lines beyond
which
sewer, water and roads do not go. Palm Beach, Fla., St.
Helena,
Calif., and Southampton, N.Y., set population caps. Big Sur,
Calif.
has decreed itself a "no-development zone."

To save Ithaca, we
will need candidates who will announce that Ithaca is no longer a
playground for developers. We will need legislators who will
not only
declare this but enforce it. We will need lawyers and planners who will
keep speculators from sliding under the door. And the public
needs to
demand this now. Those who favor some , many or all possible
controls
can donate time or money to Save Ithaca, c/co Self-Reliance Center.

Whether
rapid or slow, urban growth has proven impractical, producing gross
blobs on the map, where communities used to be. It is time to
invent
orderly transitions toward new ways to go. Beyond growth
management,
we need talk about dynamic stability. As Ithaca develops
instead the
progress of neighborhood life, and the growth of simple friendliness
and simple hunan happiness, we will learn to live creatively with
nature, rather than destroy it. If we want for ourselves, our
children
and grandchildren a world with a future, we will plan 100 year ahead
rather than five. Sacramento, Calif., has based its plans
partly on
interviews with schoolkids.

Another local organization, called
Greater Ithaca Neighborhood Association, brings Ithacans together to
plan the nuts-and-bolts of such change. They recommend we
explore
these things among others:

Employ each other, rather than depend
on outside corporations. The Local Exchange Trading System
already
catalogues dozens of Ithacans who work and trade for "Ithaca
money."
This boosts local small business and protects us from national market
shocks. We are one of several LETS cites so far.

Convert parts
of residential streets into park, garden and play area, to encourage
the neighborliness which deters crime. Berkeley's Slow
Streets program
does this.

Plant food trees in and around town, to ensure long-term food
supply. Ithaca currently brings 85 percent from out-of-state.

Ride bikes and superinsulate homes to cut fuel dependence and costs.

Whatever
future we choose, there will be adjustments for us all, new uses for
our skills. The talents of developer, carpenter, banker
farmer and
planner will still be needed. Greater Ithaca is part of the
burgeoning
movement which would make Ithacans stronger and prouder, and Ithaca
better, rather than bigger.